Americans know that there is a serious problem in the economy. Incomes are stagnant, and the employment situation is not improving in a meaningful way. In fact, according to new Census data, average American incomes remained virtually unchanged in 2013 and were actually 7% lower than in 2007 after adjusting for inflation. And yet, GDP continues to rise, and we are assured by the administration that the economy is in recovery. So what’s really going on here? A look at the data is revealing. Until 1999, GDP and income growth tended to move together. But since the turn of the millennium, incomes have remained flat while GDP has continued to rise, according to an analysis from the New York Times. Observing the peaks and valleys of the income line leads to some interesting conclusions. In 1999, a major worry facing Americans was a pesky computer glitch, known as the Y2K bug, that many feared would destabilize financial markets and banking systems. While none of this actually happened, the Federal Reserve, then headed by Alan Greenspan, responded with aggressive monetary expansion, increasing the country’s cash reserves by about one-third.

Bubble Popped
After the recession in 2001, partially (but only partially) brought on by the Sept. 11 attacks, the Fed continued to increase the money supply and incomes continued to decline. It was only when this expansionary monetary policy tapered off that incomes began to rise again in the runup to 2007.
Of course, 2007 brought the collapse of the housing bubble, and the response was still more stimulus. This time, they called it “quantitative easing.” When the economy failed to improve, the Fed implemented QE2 followed by QE3, continuing to flood markets with easy money and further devaluing the currency in the process.

If you look at the difference between GDP and income growth after 2007, GDP continues to rise, while incomes actually fall with time. The peaks and valleys in real income growth correspond well to aggressive action from the central bank, and while the economy is too complex a system to be explained by a single cause, the correlation is one well worth taking note of. Some argue that a lack of observed inflation means that there is nothing to worry about in what the Fed is doing, but inflation can show up in many places other than consumer prices. The Dow Jones has continued to rocket skyward, even as incomes and employment have remained flat, and commodity prices have shown signs of price bubbles that may soon burst. The high prices one would expect from massive monetary expansion are out there, they are just hiding in specific sectors of the economy, waiting to spill over into consumer prices. There are also structural problems in the economy that contribute to the problem of income stagnation. There is a mismatch of skills between workers and employers that is being exacerbated by the misdirection of resources resulting from artificially low interest rates. There are always winners and losers when government intervenes in the economy. In this case, the winners are fat-cat bankers and politicians. The losers are everyone else.

Austrian Economics
This is why country club Republicans are content to pretend this problem doesn’t exist, while Democrats increase their calls for forcible redistribution of wealth. Neither of these approaches comes close to addressing the real problem: the Fed’s easy-money policies. Real investment comes only from surplus value created by production. It doesn’t come from people taking out more loans at lower and lower interest rates. All this does is create distortions in the economy that hinder actual growth.

This is not a new idea. F.A. Hayek won a Nobel Prize for developing this theory of business cycles in 1974, and the Austrian school of economics had been warning about the dangers of artificial credit expansion for nearly a century before that. Still, today the Federal Reserve remains one of the most powerful and unaccountable institutions in the world. But it doesn’t have to be. For the second time in the last three years, the House just overwhelmingly voted to audit the Fed and demand some degree of transparency in one of America’s most secretive agencies.

When this bill passed the House in 2012, Majority Leader Harry Reid refused to bring it to a vote in the Senate, despite having repeatedly gone on record in support of a Fed audit. He shouldn’t be allowed to duck responsibility a second time. Anyone who is concerned about the economic stagnation in America, either on the left or the right, should demand accountability from the agency that wields tremendous power with very little transparency. The middle class deserves better than to watch their money waste away in the interest of propping up the nation’s biggest banks.

Peter is a Real Estate Broker at Professional Brokers Group (License No. 023000), covering the greater Short Sale area of Colorado.
Phone: 720-299-7373Email Us

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Helping Short Sale Realtor home owners avoid foreclosure with a short sale.
Peter Janisch specializes in short sales in Short Sale Realtor. I am your Short Sale Realtor Short Sale Specialist Realtor and Short Sale Realtor loan modification and distressed property expert. This article and content is for general informational purposes and may not be accurate. This should not be taken as legal advice, technical or tax advice under any circumstance. Seek legal advise and representation in all legal matters.

For the moment, our top public health officials are quite adamant that there absolutely will not be a major Ebola outbreak in the United States. But what if they are wrong? Or what would happen if terrorists released a form of weaponized Ebola or weaponized small pox in one of our major cities? What would such an event do to our economy? I think that we can get some clues by looking at the economic collapses that are taking place in Liberia, Guinea and Sierra Leone right now. When an extremely deadly virus like Ebola starts spreading like wildfire, the fear that it creates can be even worse for a society than the disease. All of a sudden people don’t want to go to work, people don’t want to go to school and people definitely don’t want to go shopping. There are very few things that can shut down the economy of a nation faster. Considering the fact that our big banks are being more reckless than ever, we better hope that we don’t see a “black swan event” such as a major Ebola outbreak come along and upset the apple cart. Because if that does happen, our Ponzi scheme of an economy could implode really quick.

Right now there is just one confirmed case of Ebola in Texas. If they isolated him before he infected anyone else, we might be okay for the moment. But already we are being told that there may be ” a possible 2nd Ebola victim” in Dallas…
Health officials are closely monitoring a possible second Ebola patient who had close contact with the first person to be diagnosed in the U.S., the director of Dallas County’s health department said Wednesday.

All who have been in close contact with the man officially diagnosed are being monitored as a precaution, Zachary Thompson, director of Dallas County Health and Human Services, said in a morning interview with WFAA-TV, Dallas-Fort Worth.

“Let me be real frank to the Dallas County residents: The fact that we have one confirmed case, there may be another case that is a close associate with this particular patient,” he said. “So this is real. There should be a concern, but it’s contained to the specific family members and close friends at this moment.”

Peter is a Real Estate Broker at Professional Brokers Group (License No. 023000), covering the greater Short Sale area of Colorado.
Phone: 720-299-7373Email Us

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Helping Short Sale Realtor home owners avoid foreclosure with a short sale.
Peter Janisch specializes in short sales in Short Sale Realtor. I am your Short Sale Realtor Short Sale Specialist Realtor and Short Sale Realtor loan modification and distressed property expert. This article and content is for general informational purposes and may not be accurate. This should not be taken as legal advice, technical or tax advice under any circumstance. Seek legal advise and representation in all legal matters.

Peter is a Real Estate Broker at Professional Brokers Group (License No. 023000), covering the greater Short Sale area of Colorado.
Phone: 720-299-7373Email Us

Please fill out the contact form below if you wish for Peter to contact you.
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Helping Short Sale Realtor home owners avoid foreclosure with a short sale.
Peter Janisch specializes in short sales in Short Sale Realtor. I am your Short Sale Realtor Short Sale Specialist Realtor and Short Sale Realtor loan modification and distressed property expert. This article and content is for general informational purposes and may not be accurate. This should not be taken as legal advice, technical or tax advice under any circumstance. Seek legal advise and representation in all legal matters.

Friday was Non farm payroll day with an announced 248,000 new jobs created in September, the unemployment rate dropped to 5.9%. This is the lowest unemployment rate since 2008 so it “looks” like we have recovered and the financial crisis should only be a bad memory. I am going to tell you we are living in a financial mirage.

In September, if you look under the hood you will also see 315,000 no longer included in the labor force bringing the total up to 92.6 million people. Looking back to 2008, there were 78 million “not in the labor force” so we can see a nearly 15 million person increase in this category since then. We also had an “adjustment” of a negative 26,000 jobs subtracted to arrive at the 248,000 figure, so if believable the real job growth was 274,000. “Believable”? Not by me, here is Paul Craig Roberts take More Bad News From The Jobs Front — Paul Craig Roberts. My point is this, there are 15 million more people “not working” since 2008 but for “appearance sake” are categorized as “not in the workforce” or not looking for a job. Doing some very simple math, what do these 15 million represent? Somewhere between 4% and 5% of the entire U.S. population, that’s what!

So we have the “lowest” unemployment since 2008 at 5.9% and this headline will be splashed all over the headlines that say “happy times are here again!”. Before doing the very difficult math of “how much does 5.9 + four or five equal?”, I would like to point something out. We are now about 30 days away from the national midterm elections, could the unemployment rate have been “engineered” downward to paint a rosy picture so the balance of power in the Senate remains Democrat? This was the very last employment number the public will see before they “vote early and vote often”. OK, I know you were dying to do the math, 5.9% plus either four or five percent equals either 9.9% or 10.9% … Of course, if unemployment was calculated the way it was back in the 1980’s we would have a figure approaching 20% but that would be totally unacceptable for the financial mirage we are living.

Peter is a Real Estate Broker at Professional Brokers Group (License No. 023000), covering the greater Short Sale area of Colorado.
Phone: 720-299-7373Email Us

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Helping Short Sale Realtor home owners avoid foreclosure with a short sale.
Peter Janisch specializes in short sales in Short Sale Realtor. I am your Short Sale Realtor Short Sale Specialist Realtor and Short Sale Realtor loan modification and distressed property expert. This article and content is for general informational purposes and may not be accurate. This should not be taken as legal advice, technical or tax advice under any circumstance. Seek legal advise and representation in all legal matters.

A long term secular bear market in the housing market began in 2005. The Fed and Government were able to engineer a short dead-cat bounce using in excess of $2 trillion in stimulus. This video shows that the momentum behind the dead-cat bounce has stalled and explains why the housing market is going to go lower from here.

Peter is a Real Estate Broker at Professional Brokers Group (License No. 023000), covering the greater Short Sale area of Colorado.
Phone: 720-299-7373Email Us

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Helping Short Sale Realtor home owners avoid foreclosure with a short sale.
Peter Janisch specializes in short sales in Short Sale Realtor. I am your Short Sale Realtor Short Sale Specialist Realtor and Short Sale Realtor loan modification and distressed property expert. This article and content is for general informational purposes and may not be accurate. This should not be taken as legal advice, technical or tax advice under any circumstance. Seek legal advise and representation in all legal matters.

At the height of the financial crisis in 2008 the U.S. government forced some of the countries largest banks to take “bailout” funds amounting to billions of dollars in order to keep them from going bankrupt. It was a move designed to not only keep too-big-to-fail financial institutions afloat, but one that would inspire confidence and keep American consumers spending. As a result, the last several years have seen stock markets reach record highs with Americans continuing to rack up personal debt for real estate, vehicles, education, and consumer goods as if the financial crisis never happened.

But the purported recovery may not be everything that government officials and influential financial leaders have made it out to be.

Recent comments delivered by Federal Reserve Vice Chairman Stanley Fischer suggest that not only are global and domestic economies still struggling, but the U.S. government itself is preparing financial contingency plans in anticipation of another widespread economic event.

However, this time around, according to Fischer, the government won’t be bailing out financial institutions in need of cash. Instead, failing banks will turn directly to their unsecured creditors when they need money. And within this context, that means you.

The recession that began in the United States in December 2007 ended in June 2009. But the Great Recession is a near-worldwide phenomenon, with the consequences of which many advanced economies continue to struggle. Its depth and breadth appear to have changed the economic environment in many ways and to have left the road ahead unclear.

…

Work on the use of the resolution mechanisms set out in the Dodd-Frank Act, based on the principle of a single point of entry–though less advanced than the work on capital and liquidity ratios–holds the promise of making it possible to resolve banks in difficulty at no direct cost to the taxpayer.

As part of this approach, the United States is preparing a proposal to require systemically important banks to issue bail-inable long-term debt that will enable insolvent banks to recapitalize themselves in resolution without calling on government funding–this cushion is known as a “gone concern” buffer.

Peter is a Real Estate Broker at Professional Brokers Group (License No. 023000), covering the greater Short Sale area of Colorado.
Phone: 720-299-7373Email Us

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Helping Short Sale Realtor home owners avoid foreclosure with a short sale.
Peter Janisch specializes in short sales in Short Sale Realtor. I am your Short Sale Realtor Short Sale Specialist Realtor and Short Sale Realtor loan modification and distressed property expert. This article and content is for general informational purposes and may not be accurate. This should not be taken as legal advice, technical or tax advice under any circumstance. Seek legal advise and representation in all legal matters.

In the decades following World War II, Japan’s economy grew so quickly and for so long that experts came to describe it as nothing short of miraculous. During the country’s last big boom, between 1986 and 1991, its economy expanded by nearly $1 trillion. But then, in a story with clear parallels for today, Japan’s asset bubble burst, and its markets went into a deep dive. Government debt ballooned, and annual growth slowed to less than one percent. By 1998, the economy was shrinking.

That December, a Princeton economics professor named Ben Bernanke argued that central bankers could still turn the country around. Japan was essentially suffering from a deficiency of demand: interest rates were already low, but consumers were not buying, firms were not borrowing, and investors were not betting. It was a self-fulfilling prophesy: pessimism about the economy was preventing a recovery. Bernanke argued that the Bank of Japan needed to act more aggressively and suggested it consider an unconventional approach: give Japanese households cash directly. Consumers could use the new windfalls to spend their way out of the recession, driving up demand and raising prices.

As Bernanke made clear, the concept was not new: in the 1930s, the British economist John Maynard Keynes proposed burying bottles of bank notes in old coal mines; once unearthed (like gold), the cash would create new wealth and spur spending. The conservative economist Milton Friedman also saw the appeal of direct money transfers, which he likened to dropping cash out of a helicopter. Japan never tried using them, however, and the country’s economy has never fully recovered. Between 1993 and 2003, Japan’s annual growth rates averaged less than one percent.

Today, most economists agree that like Japan in the late 1990s, the global economy is suffering from insufficient spending, a problem that stems from a larger failure of governance. Central banks, including the U.S. Federal Reserve, have taken aggressive action, consistently lowering interest rates such that today they hover near zero. They have also pumped trillions of dollars’ worth of new money into the financial system. Yet such policies have only fed a damaging cycle of booms and busts, warping incentives and distorting asset prices, and now economic growth is stagnating while inequality gets worse. It’s well past time, then, for U.S. policymakers — as well as their counterparts in other developed countries — to consider a version of Friedman’s helicopter drops. In the short term, such cash transfers could jump-start the economy. Over the long term, they could reduce dependence on the banking system for growth and reverse the trend of rising inequality. The transfers wouldn’t cause damaging inflation, and few doubt that they would work. The only real question is why no government has tried them.

Peter is a Real Estate Broker at Professional Brokers Group (License No. 023000), covering the greater Short Sale area of Colorado.
Phone: 720-299-7373Email Us

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Helping Short Sale Realtor home owners avoid foreclosure with a short sale.
Peter Janisch specializes in short sales in Short Sale Realtor. I am your Short Sale Realtor Short Sale Specialist Realtor and Short Sale Realtor loan modification and distressed property expert. This article and content is for general informational purposes and may not be accurate. This should not be taken as legal advice, technical or tax advice under any circumstance. Seek legal advise and representation in all legal matters.

Peter is a Real Estate Broker at Professional Brokers Group (License No. 023000), covering the greater Short Sale area of Colorado.
Phone: 720-299-7373Email Us

Please fill out the contact form below if you wish for Peter to contact you.
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Helping Short Sale Realtor home owners avoid foreclosure with a short sale.
Peter Janisch specializes in short sales in Short Sale Realtor. I am your Short Sale Realtor Short Sale Specialist Realtor and Short Sale Realtor loan modification and distressed property expert. This article and content is for general informational purposes and may not be accurate. This should not be taken as legal advice, technical or tax advice under any circumstance. Seek legal advise and representation in all legal matters.

“If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks…will deprive the people of all property until their children wake-up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered…. The issuing power should be taken from the banks and restored to the people, to whom it properly belongs.” – Thomas Jefferson

Does this chart portray an economic recovery in any way? Wages have been stagnant since the START of the supposed recovery in 2010. Real median household income, even using the highly understated CPI, is on a glide path to oblivion. You just need to observe with your own two eyes the number of Space Available signs in front of office buildings, strip centers and malls across America to realize we have further to fall. Low paying, part-time burger flipping jobs aren’t going to revive this debt saturated economic system. But at least the .1% are enjoying their Federal Reserve created high. Fiat is a powerful drug when administered in large doses to addicts on Wall Street.

The S&P 500 has risen from 666 in March of 2009 to 1,972 today. That is a 196% increase in a little over five years. During this same time, real household income has fallen by 7%. There have been a few million jobs added, while 11 million people have left the labor market. According to Robert Shiller’s CAPE ratio, the stock market valuation has only been higher, three times in history – 1929, 1999, and 2007. He seems flabbergasted by why valuations are so high. Sometimes really smart people can act really dumb.

The Federal Reserve balance sheet was $900 billion before the 2008 financial crisis. Today it stands at $4.4 trillion. The Fed has increased their balance sheet by 220% since the March 2009 market lows. Do you think there is any correlation between the Fed puppets printing $2.4 trillion and handing it to their Wall Street puppeteers, who used their high frequency trading supercomputers and ability to rig the markets so they never lose, and the third stock bubble in the last 13 years? It’s so self evident that only an Ivy League economist or CNBC anchor wouldn’t be able to see it.

Let’s look at the amazing stock market recovery without Federal Reserve heroine pumped into the veins of Wall Street banker addicts. If you divide the S&P 500 Index by the size of the Federal reserve balance sheet, you see the true purpose of QE1, QE2, and QE3. It wasn’t to save Main Street. It was to save Wall Street. Without the Federal Reserve funneling fiat to the .1% banking cabal and creating inflation in energy, food, and other basic necessities for the 99.9%, there is no stock market recovery. The recovery has occurred in Manhattan and the Hamptons. It’s been non-existent for the vast majority of people in this country. The wealth effect and trickle down theory have been disproved in spades. The only thing trickling down on the former middle class from the Fed is warm and yellow.

Peter is a Real Estate Broker at Professional Brokers Group (License No. 023000), covering the greater Short Sale area of Colorado.
Phone: 720-299-7373Email Us

Please fill out the contact form below if you wish for Peter to contact you.
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Helping Short Sale Realtor home owners avoid foreclosure with a short sale.
Peter Janisch specializes in short sales in Short Sale Realtor. I am your Short Sale Realtor Short Sale Specialist Realtor and Short Sale Realtor loan modification and distressed property expert. This article and content is for general informational purposes and may not be accurate. This should not be taken as legal advice, technical or tax advice under any circumstance. Seek legal advise and representation in all legal matters.

Peter is a Real Estate Broker at Professional Brokers Group (License No. 023000), covering the greater Short Sale area of Colorado.
Phone: 720-299-7373Email Us

Please fill out the contact form below if you wish for Peter to contact you.
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Helping Short Sale Realtor home owners avoid foreclosure with a short sale.
Peter Janisch specializes in short sales in Short Sale Realtor. I am your Short Sale Realtor Short Sale Specialist Realtor and Short Sale Realtor loan modification and distressed property expert. This article and content is for general informational purposes and may not be accurate. This should not be taken as legal advice, technical or tax advice under any circumstance. Seek legal advise and representation in all legal matters.